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The Wired State

01/08/2014

Could we please have a different process and more kinds of people decide this great matter of national security than this guy:

(this was fake album cover art for a fake punk band Snowden dreamed up back in the day)

and these people (the Silicon Valley titans who met with Obama to make a deal as to what they will find acceptable in all this).

Photo by Pete Souza, The White House, December 17, 2013.

and this guy?

[picture of Glenn Greenwald in flip-flops and barking dogs and screaming monkeys in the trees if I had one]

There is a debate about clemency for Snowden, or what sort of punishmen is appropriate, and it's a sterile one, and one I think disingenuous.

It distracts from the real issues of why does Snowden get to decide reform, why do his journalist activists get to decide reform, and why Obama has to be rushed into reforming something that in fact may not need reforming -- and wasn't democratically decided.

The RUSH to reform the agencies in the US -- unseemly, given that only six months have passed since Snowden's hack -- is one I am not in favour of.

I don't see that the NSA needs reform. Sorry, I will buck the tide here. That is, I don't see that it needs reform through these methods which I find suspect.

I think there are ten other things that have to be decided first, conceptually. They are:

1. Is Obama destroying the state? Obviously, you wouldn't want to do a delicate and hard thing like fix the NSA if that's what Barry is really up to. The elements of the state that make up national security -- the Department of Defense (Pentagon), the military, the Department of Justice, the FBI, the Attorney General's office, Homeland Security -- not to mention the NSA and CIA -- they all seem under terrible assault under Obama (see "Why is Our Military So Screwed Up?). I would submit in all clear seriousness not as a conspiracy theory that Obama is undermining all these bodies as institutions. Just by paying attention to everything from how Swartz's case undermined the justice system, not only Holder but liberal attorneys general; the cases of WikiLeaks, Snowden and Manning of course; Petraeus and all the rest; even things like failing to fill all the top posts at Homeland Security and now also making other controversial hires. Robert Gates new memoir seems to make something like this case.

I say it's not a conspiracy theory but a genuine investigation that has to be had. Obviously, there are all kinds of reasons why governments are undermined in our time -- the Internet, demographic booms of young people, the recession, global warming, bird flu -- whatever. I'm interested in examining closely what Obama is up to here.

I really think thoughtful journalists need to lay out a timeline of Obama's actions, starting from when he didn't do anything with the DoD and CIA and kept Bush's people at first -- as almost a feint and a dodge -- leading to the most methodical and destructive demolition of the armed forces I've seen since Stalin -- this is a post for another day.

So that's question number one. If we are not dealing with a sincere president but dealing with one who, for stealth socialist/ideological reasons, however sincere (and I don't think for a minute they are), then his "reform" efforts have to be looked at with a really weather eye.

2. Is a little commission of Obama's cronies, that is not good enough for Marcy Wheeler, nor me, even if for wildly different reasons, really the way you reform a giant, complex, wounded thing like the NSA, post-Snowden? I'm sorry, I don't think so. And yet, supposedly, that's our only process -- they rush out a really rather thin report, for all its length; Obama ponders it and rushes edicts? Why?

Reason: because when we reformed these agencies post-Clifford Case'srevelations and all the rest in the COINTELPRO years, which, as the FBI itself admits, was opposd by Congress and the American people; we had CONGRESS do this. You know, those people we elected? I'm much, more more in favour of having them, through the democratic political process, do this. I don't care that you think Congress people aren't technical and don't understand the issues, that's bullshit, of course they do, Google has bought quite a few of them. They just don't always understand them your way. I don't care that you think Congress is irrelevant, or, as the Tor developer put it, "should go die in a fire" or should be "routed around" or is "broken". What geeks mean is that it is democratic in ways they don't like. I'm not for indulging their anarchic political monopoly here, I'd like to keep Congress as the pluralistic, representative thing it is, whatever it's flaws. I really don't think we can solve this with an app where only get to "like".

3. Should reform ever be undertaken by force? There are smug wags saying about the NSA, "Some people are born with openness, some acquire openness, and some have openness thrust upon them" and so we should just be grown-ups and proceed anyway. I disagree. I don't like the way any of this smells. It is not right. It is wrong.

I don't think Snowden "started a national conversation" and "raised important issues" because it was not done legitimately, openly and democratically -- liberally. It was done BY FORCE. By a handful of anarchist thugs and activist journalists with a huge beef with the US that in some cases just comes down to their personal sad childhoods without good fathers, and in other cases is very well organized subversion, maybe with some hostile help from Russia and others.

What kind of conversation is it, where we don't get to object? Where we can't say, hey, who are you, you haven't answered 100 questions about yourself and your flight to Moscow, who do you think you are?

Stealth socialists always talk about how so-and-so with his violent or anarchistm movment, in the SDS or Occupy, "started a national conversation" -- I've heard this phrase uttered in movement meetings for years. What they mean is that they presented forceful facts on the ground through coercion. When you try to change society that way, it doesn't work. There is resistance. And you yourself are thuggish and illegitimate.

4. We the people are not in charge of this process -- only a few anarchists and "progressive" politicians are.Snowden think's his mission is accomplished because he wanted to see if the American people would reform if he started this. Now he thinks they have. Why? Merely because he;

o started an international mass hysteria making everyone hate America and fear its intelligence operations

o got saturation media coverage by liberal and libertarians that pretty much define the media;

o got a few lefty Congress people like Ron Wyden to speak out and had a few hearings where the NSA people were grilled;

o got Obama to have this little crony commission to discuss things;

o produced two contradictory judicial decisions under duress from law-farers of the extreme left and extreme right.

Um, what? That's not the American people. That's just Jameel Jaffe, Glenn Greenwald, Cass Sunstein, Ron Wyden, some truthers and some bloggers. It's not me, and it's not even you even if you disagree with me. This is not a public process. It is not democratic. It doesn't have ownership.

There have only been a few hearings on this subject, one of which produced -- under duress -- this supposed "lie" of James Clapper. I definitely support the way the NSA has responded to this -- that it is not an intentional misleading -- and I don't believe it is a lie.

My point is that this is not enough. We need more hearings. We need things even on why Tor is developed and allowed to be used by criminals to the damage of US security. LOTS more hearings. Congressional commissions. Other panels of distinction that aren't this crazy thing Obama put together.

In my view, the best thing Gen. Alexander, Michael Hayden and these sorts of people could do is not disappear from view, but fight. Make a think tank. Make a Committee for the Clear and Present Danger. And put forth their knowledgeable views.

5. We have not achieved agreement on what should be put under surveillance. To hear Jacob Appelbaum, Snowden helper and Tor developer, we should not have any spies. Glenn Greenwald might tolerate one small spy shop in Jackson Hole, Wyoming that just makes sure incoming missiles don't land on American territory from North Korea. So we need to have a debate -- and that starts with a really full and frank awareness that Snowden's operation is not about civil liberties, but damaging relations with allies, as this list helpfully explains from Jim Geraghty.

6. We have not achieved agreement on what is metadata or whether collecting it violates privacy. Extreme civil libertarians -- civil rights activists aren't really what they should be called anymore -- think the government shouldn't be able to collect data, under law, and then task it when looking for suspects, under a set of rules. I think they should. I'm immune to scare tactics by Glenn Greenwald who says that if I think that, I should give him my email archive. Nonsense. The government doesn't read my email archive -- let alone dox it on Pastebin like Glenn's little script-kiddy friends would. There's no comparison. The MIT nerds trying to make people think that reading headers and making social graphs from them with their scare program is the same thing are also incorrect. The government doesn't make massive social graphs and mine them indiscriminately for no reason. They follow suspects. Our names are in the telephone book. Unfortunately, our addresses and phone numbers, whether we like it or not, are on Spokeo. And our metadata is at the NSA. Too bad. That''s life in the big city.

7. We need to decide what signals are. In the old days, when the NSA got started in 1975, a signal that they should track was just a thing coming from a Soviet submarine, an enemy radio communications, foreign broadcasting, stuff like that. SIGINT wasn't HUMINT because humans, by and large, didn't emit signals.

It wasn't your teenager's Snapchat on Android phones or your IMs on your iPhone the way it is now. We are all now producing signals; before only governments and various broadcasting entities and various combatants and such produced signals. Now each and every one of us is a little telegraph station, broadcasting our me-shows 24/7.

Lenin said that the first thing to do in any revolution is to overthrow the telegraph station. And that's what Snowden and Greenwald and their shadowy helpers have done -- overthrown a lot of us with fear and confusion and crazyness. We have to get a grip. We are all signalling. But the government is not picking it all up, and when it does, it's for good cause. Let's define this, please, and stop the madness.

8. Courts are currently divided on this for a variety of reasons -- the specifics of the cases; the left versus the right bringing the suit; the DC libertarian Republicans versus the Democratic Machine in NYC appointing the judges; the more physically devastating experience of 9/11 in New York versus Washington; lots of things. It is what it is. It will go to the Supreme Court. But it will not be decided there, any more than ObamaCare was really decided there. So again, this is too big to be only about any one branch of government, all must be involved.

9. Media must investigate Snowden and his helpers far more than they have. Loud-mouthed and guilt-tripping Glen Greenwald has made it seem to liberals that they can never ask questions about "the indoor cat" in Russia. Why not? He's demanding nothing less than a coercive, thuggish, undemocratic overthrow of our government's vital national security agencies. Why can't we be a little more curious about that, guys? Outside a few journalists like Fred Kaplan at Salon and Michael Kelley at Business Insider, and a few bloggers like frankly me and very eloquently Benjamin Wittes, there's nobody going against the tide. And of course also Craig Pirrong (could the bizarre hugely visible attack underway on him over his Wall Street consulting and his views by the New York Times be related to his principled and persistent critique of Snowden? When I see what has happened with Craig, I feel as if I get a glimpse of what could happen to me.)

What we need is more information about those calling for this undemocratic change precisely because it is undemocratic and was started by them for murky motives. We need more glasnost. We need time for more newspapers, more TV shows like 60 minutes (which got nothing but shit from the "progressives" despite their SATURATION pro-Snowden coverge DOMINATING every single broadcasting media for months on end -- disgraceful). We need more blogs, like this guy's:

So when I hear people arguing about The New York Times editorial stance on Edward Snowden, or read civic-minded freakouts about the National Security Agency violating the civil liberties of "ordinary Americans," I turn away in frustration.

Sure, we need to be concerned about the power we give to government. Duh. Glad we're finally having that conversation.

But the public media freakout over NSA data collection misses the primary point of those systems entirely: The NSA's email metadata campaign is designed to efficiently collect and then discard information. Not because the NSA is a civic-minded agency that wants to protect our theoretical privacy, but because your personal email isn't the target of the fucking machine. Your mundane metadata is the shit that NSA machine operators have to shovel in order to find covert organizations.

Simple and straightforward, isn't it? And we have to shut down metadata collection entirely on the strength of one or two progs in Congress, a few progs in the media, and a prog Obama crony commission? Instead? Really? Why? This is America!

10. We have to consult with allies. After all, not only the five-eyes program, but just the interconnected world at large requires that the US not proceed in isolation -- nor be spooked into action by scare headlines manufactured by dubious people.

01/03/2014

Do you find it hard to understand what left and right, liberal and conservative, progressive and libertarian mean any more?

Is Glenn Greenwald on the left or right? Libertarian (he used to consult for Cato) or communist (he has spoken before the Socialist Workers' Party annual meeting)?

How can it be that if Greenwald debates Ruth Marcus, a liberal Democrat and columnist in the liberal Washington Post, denounced by conservatives, he and his Twitter sock-puppets/cronies can accuse her of supporting the Bush Administration's torture? But wait, she agrees that James Clapper "lied" and "he should be ashamed of it" and "it's totally intolerable" -- so what's the difference between her anti-NSA statement and Greenwald's?! (well, he will settle for nothing less than a trial and punishment of this "lying" official, and Marcus points out to this lawfaring lawyer that perjury law is complicated and getting a judge to actually do this against an official merely doing his job as he saw fit would be quite hard to do).

Do you wonder how it is that Paul Carr, Mark Ames formerly of the Exile and Yasha Levine, all funded by Silicon Valley (they were bought out by Pando Daily) and technolibertarians of sorts (or are they?) can print trash about Snowden, and suddenly decide to bash Glenn Greenwald and Jay Rosen, the NYU professor, for joining on to the new media enterprise First Look -- funded by the ebay millionaire Pierre Omidyar, who himself loves Greenwald...who speaks to the socialists? They're all about Big IT and Silicon Valley and technocommunism in the end -- why don't they get along?

How is it that Jacob Appelbaum, who still apparently gets Department of Defense funding and never really seems to scream about Obama the way Glenn Greenwald does, can be doing even more radical work revealing documents that aren't even from Snowden, but could even be -- who knows! -- from some GRU mole in the NSA merely using the Snowden flurries as a cover?

Well, if you look at this handy-dandy infographic chart I've made (sorry, I suck at Photoshopping), you will start to see how it all comes together -- or falls apart (and this chart helps explain why Omidyar and Greenwald will not last.)

Think of the four corners of our Metaverse as the extremes of thinking 1) Obama is a devil; 2) Obama is an angel; 3) Snowden is a traitor, or 4) Snowden is a hero. That's one level (think of the first horizontal X-axis in Second Life).

Then, think of people's attitudes towards capitalism and communism which really infuse everything (that's the Y-axis then, or a second horizontal layer). Everyone likes to pretend these categories and these ideologies don't exist anymore, but of course they do. Look, do you like Occupy Wall Street and want to shut down the stock market and jail the banksters? Then you're a communist. Do you think it's okay for Goldman Sachs and wealthy law firms to fund Obama's campaign along with Google, even though you're for that crazy unworkable socialist ObamaCare of his? Then you're a capitalist. Understood. Don't pretend these categories don't exist.

But there's more -- there's your attitude toward government -- think of this as yet another axis (like the vertical Z in Second Life if this were a 3D object which of course we could make in Second Life but I can't draw here).

There you might be an anarchist (no government), or a minarchist (for minimal government, but at least some); you might be for democracy, which means elected officials and separation of powers and the rule of law, or corporatocracy, which might be rule-by-law and emphasis on both private corporations and governments agencies.

Above the "democracy" line you will find those who like Obama -- he's president, after all -- and tend to think Snowden has done something wrong -- he's broken the law and gone against the democratc consensus that yes, we do need state secrets and agencies to keep them -- and find intelligence to keep us safe.

Or below the "democracy" line, you still might be in the Obama tank and loving Snowden, but you might be for oligarchy, which is where there is a state nominally affirming capitalism, or engaging in "state capitalism" as the Trotskyists called it -- but just as likely embracing many aspects of communism. This state still accords power to certain wealthy boyars -- as long as they support the state. You may even want to transform this state so that it is better for your business.

If you're under the anarchy line, you're for destroying government and running everything from the Internet and the IRC channel with your friends, maybe with a Drupal site and some Liquid Democracy Pirate Party "voting" scheme -- but fuck America, militaries, even roads.

Well, you get the idea. It's a grid -- and you can slide in any direction up or down or across or diagonally.

Naturally, I've put myself in the most perfect, centrist, democratic and good position, as any author would : )

But note what else is going on -- the attitiudes towards technology and how it will be used to pursue one's other values of anarchy or statism, communism or corporativism or statism.

Technocommunist as readers of this blog know is a belief that you can collectivize people online and use technology to redistribute wealth; the state withers away, as it is supposed to under communism and "every cook can rule the state". Of course, there's an avant-garde of the workers who know best (coders).

Technolibertarian can amount to "communism for thee but not for me" or a belief in social Darwinism, Randianism, meritocracy on steroids -- and no illusions that you will teach the homeless to code or even most kids in high school to do anything. Fuck 'em, you are going to have California secede from the United States.

Technoliberal means that you embrace technological innovation but you expect democratic government to maintain oversight over technology so that it does not harm liberal democracy itself.

Technoprogressive means that you believe in the transformative power of technology to change human nature and "make a better world" and you will make money in order to spend it on establishing socialism -- which will work better because of technology and distributive...stuff.

Technosocialist means that you would establish more limits on corporations in establishing your equitable society, except for the Big IT ones and those that provide you a paycheck. Distribution will be coerced. You're welcome.

Technostalinist means that you are for using technology to settle scores with your political enemies, and establishing some kind of state that can crush evil greedy oligarchs and capitalists.

And that's how we get the different boxes in this grid.

You could find Snowden a hero and think Obama is a devil -- and be a technolibertarian like Rand Paul for minimal government.

Or you could find Snowden a hero and not think much of Obama but not really pay attention to him, and be for anarchism and communism -- which you think you and your friends will implement just fine.

OR you could find Obama an angel and Snowden a traitor -- that would put you on the top of the box, with the majority of Americans, quite frankly.

Somebody like me who did not vote for Obama a second time is still in that box because Obama is,after all, the president, the result of a democratic election and therefore a figure of legitimate authority. Looking at this box, you could additionally pin little pictures of Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton, Paul Ryan or Ted Cruz into the boxes fairly easily -- I'd be on the Hillary side of the line.

Supportive readers of this blog will likely have no trouble finding MarkAmesExiled in the Technostalinist box. That's because he hates capitalism -- he loathes Obama as a sell-out to Wall Street -- and he is for hanging capitalists he hates from the lamp posts. He admires Eduard Limonov, the National Bolshevik, and he finds Snowden a traitor - but a traitor to...what, exactly? A powerful state that he imagines can be made a utopian state by ridding it of evil, corrupt capitalists? He's no anarchist, in fact, and he's no libertarian, because he imagines some mighty force that will be capable of punishing these big, evil oligarchs. There isn't any such force except Stalin.

Paul Carr, on the other hand, might slide more toward the technolibertarian box because he's more of a softy, but at the end of the day, his paycheck is still signed by the titans of Silicon Valley and he appreciates that.

Up in the love-Obama box is of course Jeff Gauvin, 18,000 followers, unfollower of me because I said something he didn't like once, hater of Greenwald, lover of Obama (his Twitter name is Jefferson Obama). Jeff is actually Canadian, for all his American hero handles, and therefore tends toward the socialist as a national trait -- Canada is a country where a large percentage of the working population has jobs with the government or funded by the government.

Jeff is typical of a lot of tweeters who loathe Greenwald because he threatens their Obama and their progressivism with his...libertarian/communism or whatever it is. Note that I have Greenwald straddle the two categories because I think Greenwald just does what's best for Greenwald in the end, a powerful force that perhaps someday, may lead to contrition or at least turncoating.

John Schindler is more liberal than I am -- he's for reforming the NSA and I'm for leaving it absolutely untouched until other more profound issues are solved (more on that later) and until Obama is out of office, since I believe as a stealth-socialist, Obama is merely trying to destroy the capitalist state.

We may or may not get lucky and get Hillary back, in which case I will vote for her and so will John Schindler. If we get only Elizabeth Warren as a candidate because of powerful hate-Hillary forces gathering in quite a few of those boxes, I will definitely NOT vote for her; Schindler, I don't know.

Poor General Alexander I've put in the corporatocracy box merely as a kind of symbol. I have no idea what his personal views are. He may be a closet libertarian, for all I know. He may be a liberal Democrat struggling to reform this monster -- who knows. I'm assuming that he's mad as hell at Snowden and I'm putting him very close to the "Snowden=traitor" box. I'm putting him in the same column with the "Obama as devil" because I have to figure Gen. Alexander feels like Obama threw him under the bus. I put him in the corporate box merely because the symbiosis between the military and the private corporate contractors makes up a state-within-a-state in some ways, although I am not a conspiracy monger and actually don't think there is something inherently wrong with military contracting in a free and capitalist society. It's just a tendency you want to watch and regulate and I'm for doing less contracting and having more paid, benefitted staff -- Manning and Snowden were contractors.

I actually think the most important thing Gen. Alexander could do is to form a think tank to fight for national security after he retires, responding to all the outrageous things that people are likely to do to the NSA.

Why don't I put myself up smack against the traitor box?

Well, I don't think that's a useful category to discuss Snowden, really; usually I'll call him "that little felon." To be a traitor, you would have had to show loyalty to you country first, and then betray it; I think for Snowden, the Internet is his country, he has absolutely no loyalty to anything like "homeland" or "government" and leans toward technocommunism or technolibertarianism if not technostalinism -- after all, he ran to first China, then Russia to help him in his struggle to smash the American state.

I think the issue is this: there are warring factions in government, and Snowden represents in fact a faction within the state -- the Wired State in the making, if you will, which is part old state, part oligarchs, part anarchists or Stalinists.

That's why I worry. Cory Ondreijka, formerly of the Navy and the NSA, represents just such a faction, too (more on him soon). While I'm generally supportive of the NSA as an institution, and I find it legitimate and necessary; I'm not supportive of some of the geek factions in government, including in the NSA, which I view as the enemy of liberal democracy (and they exist out of government, too, and are in a revolving door between government and Silicon Valley).

It used to be that people in government in the civil service and foreign service had their little factions, but they kept them to themselves, engaging only in minor skirmishes and minor sabotage; they more or less served the elected president.

They don't do that any more, since the wikification of government and social media gave them a lever and a voice to destroy government leadership they don't like.

So now people who are for friending Iran, despite the will of the Congress or the pragmatism of a compromising president, will deliberately leak, sabotage, undermine and present people with fait accomplis.

They'll make anonymous Twitter accounts and so damage there.

People who think the smart, hip thing to do is to dump on Israel as the problem for why America doesn't have good street cred in the world also leak, sabotage, undermine and create facts on the ground (like the botching of Syria and capitulation in Iran negotiations).

Well, you get the idea! See what you think and suggest ideas and changes. If anybody is better at Photoshop than I am, you're welcome to make this look better, just credit me for the idea!

But are Schmidt and his customers really surprised that the NSA looked
for such a hole in Google's infrastructure and asked its foreign allies
to exploit it? While Schmidt and many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs
likely share the civil liberties concerns of many of their fellow
citizens, the last several months of Snowden disclosures may be more
troubling to leading internet firms for another less obvious reason:
what they say about the role of technology on the world stage.

Indeed.

It's a tale that Schmidt and his coauthor Jared Cohen—a former advisor
to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and now head of Google's internal
think tank—retell at length in the book they released earlier this year,
The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business.
Schmidt and Cohen are careful, as they gaze into their crystal ball,
not to see a utopia. New technology, they acknowledge, can be used by
authoritarians and terrorists just as easily as democrats and
human-rights campaigners. Still, they are clear that the arrival of the
internet age signals no less than a new epoch of history—in which a
virtual world must simultaneously exist as a new testament alongside the
old one. As they write,
their vision is "a tale of two civilizations: One is physical and has
developed over thousands of years, and the other is virtual and is still
very much in formation."

But speaking of virtual worlds, one of the appalling things about their ideology is the ardent belief that a mammoth virtual world -- the Internetization of things and everything -- is being built on top of this one, that we will all "have" to live in. And that real life will be "mapped" to this monstrous entity that will of course be run by coders (and PS not the NSA) and that such mapping/integration will make things "better" instead of being a God Awful Mess.

I begin to see why Schmidt is so fascinated with shall we say "distressed" states like North Korea or Somalia or Iraq. It's like the way doctors used to learn about the brain if there was, say, a train conductor who lost part of his brain and then lived in the eternal present.

By studying these dislocated war-torn or authoritarian societies that aren't the norm, he gets a better idea of how to destroy real countries and then put them back together on the Internet.

Hence, his discussion about post-war Iraq:

A parallel authority was set up to resolve disputes. These were important steps in the reconstruction of Iraq, serving as a moderating factor to the exploitation of post-conflict intsability and instances of claiming property by force. But despite their good intentions (more than 160,000 claims were received by 2011), these commissions were hampered by certain bureaucratic restrictions that trapped many claims in complicated litigation. In the future, states will learn from this Iraqi model that a more transparent and secure form of prtoection for property rights can forestall such hassles in the event of conflict. By creating online cadastral systems (i.e., online records systems of land values and boundaries) with mobile-enabled mapping software, governments will make it possible for citizens to visualize all public and private land and even submit minor disputes, likea fence boundary, to a sanctioned online arbiter.

I feel like Schmidt should have spent even a week in Second Life, let alone Iraq, or some place like Belarus, to get the sheer folly of all this.

For one, I think he has no idea that when all land is virtualized, and all value starts to shift to its virtualization, it will start to lose value. There will be the Anshe Chung problem as the wealthy can just open up Google maps and bid on any parcel on the map all over the world that is shown in yellow "for sale" as on the map of Second Life. There will be the flipping problem. The abandoning problem. The griefing problem. The 16 m ad lot problem. The Impeach Bush sign problem. Ok, I'm going to run screaming from the room soon at this thought... I think probably only about two readers will understand what I'm talking about.

For two, I think Schmidt knows perfectly well that the Internetization of Everything will erode national boundaries and put him and his company in charge -- but he pretends that's not so.

BTW, Google had a short-lived virtual world experiment called Lively which died.

Schmidt never mentions that or Second Life or any existing experience of virtuality on line, but in a way, his entire book is about how the Internet will penetrate and virtualize everything.

Schmidt loves the idea of exile communities -- the Tibetans -- rebuilding virtual countries online that are poised to come back some day. Except they don't. The Chinese move in Han settlers, wipe out monasteries, control education, jail monks and nuns and dissenters, force more refugees, and Tibet as an actuality grows more dim. He doesn't put that bit in.

In Belaus, Lukashenka just turns off the electricity. No electricity, no computers. Or turns off the cell towers. No mobile phone, no demonstrations organized. You could have exquisite exile governments -- and they have them -- but then they founder on the rocks of the reality of dictatorships that Schmidt seems to leave beyond the frame of his thinking. He just barrels ahead planning how all these good exiles (secessionist SiliconValley, anyone?) will build wonderful virtual governments online and impose them on reality -- uh, easily. No one will object, surely.

Well, and then there's the virtualization of everything, really.

I really must try to write my book about how Second Life predicts the awfulness of the Internet of Things, including your home and even your government.

Try to think of your home as a server in Second Life, and all the delights that will come with it:

o bans and ejects

o autoreturn

o group membership -- open and closed groups

o stripping of IP addresses to out alts

o griefing with particles

o mapping and stalking.

And that's just the beginning. Wait until they take away the vote completely!

Land records were among the first things the Lindens jettisoned when they moved from making the world the product to, well, just making the product the product, in about 2008-2009 after the big boom in interest and membership.

There used to be records of every land auction (simulator, or server or part of a server), with those who participated, what they bid, and who won. Then this was blacked out -- in fact, when, of all things, they moved to using ebay auction software instead of their own custom solution (Pierre Omidyar was an early investor in SL).

They did this because land began to devalue, the more there was mapping, information, and records of it globally -- and of course, there constant printing of new land.

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the WWW, at the BBC. Photo by Documentally.

This is a topic that needs A LOT more commentary, but before it gets lost in my growing, enormous queue of important articles and books to comment on (I need staff! I need fellow bloggers to do this with me!), let me note this.

People worry about the NSA and Snowden's revelations. As you know, I don't think much of them; I don't think they are established, they don't have a case, they are about an anarchist agenda used as a cat's paw by the Kremlin, and ultimately I don't think there's a there there.

The problem with the Panopticon begins with Google and other platforms and that secessionist Silicon Valley, not the NSA, which plays catch-up trying to do the job it was hired to do. We have oversight, checks and balances, remedies, means of reform for the NSA.

We don't have ANY of those things for Google. That's why the NSA is never my primary concern.

I also have a long-term worry about the gnomes of the Internet who are steadily taking over pieces of it, and have really been galvanized now that the Snowden Affair has given them an excuse to kick the US government out of standards bodies and to oppose it in international fora and so on.

Just one year after its foundation in London, an organisation created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee
and Sir Nigel Shadbolt to stimulate economic, environmental and social
innovation through a system of open data sharing and analysis, has
announced rapid global expansion of its ambitions.

The Open Data Institute
has announced the launch of 13 international centres, known as "nodes",
each of which will bring together companies, universities, and NGOs
that support open data projects and communities. The nodes will be based
in the US, Canada, France, Dubai, Italy, Russia, Sweden and Argentina, with two extra US nodes Chicago and North Carolina. Three further UK nodes are to open in Manchester, Leeds and Brighton.

The
new ODI nodes will variously operate at local and national levels. Each
one has agreed to adopt the ODI Charter, which is a open source
codification of the ODI itself, and embodies principles of open data
business, publishing, communication, and collaboration.

But they should, because of its budgets:

The ODI is a non-for-profit organisation that has so far helped set up
more than a dozen open data-based startup companies in the UK,
generating income, research and training. It has also created a certificate for open data allowing all users to access information on many areas such as healthcare, transport, peer-to-peer lending, and energy efficiency. The UK ODI secured £10m funding over five years from the UK innovation agency, the Technology Strategy Board, $750,000 from global philanthropic investor Omidyar Network
created by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. It aims for long-term
sustainability through match funding and direct revenue through
memberships and supporters.

Note the role of Pierre Omidyar, Glenn Greenwald's new angel for this new media thing that GG has left the Guardian for.

The other people in the speakers' list will tell you of more budgets, i.e. the CTO for New York City, which has a healthy budget for open this and open that -- which has never given us an app telling us where the toilets of New York City are. (I'm going to have to code one myself, which tells me how long you may be shifting from one foot to the other.)

"Open Data" covers a multitude of sins -- I will come back another day to dissect it. These are the bureaucratic "democratic centralists" of the Wired State. They are the ones who will control your health, education, welfare -- life -- data. Not the NSA.

10/20/2013

The Times invokes The Circle, which I haven't read yet (and I hear parts of it are based on Second Life so I should), and all the Snowden stuff, and says:

Nadim Kobeissi, a security adviser in Montreal who works on an
encrypted-message service called Cryptocat, said the security and hacker
circles of which he is a part have long suspected that the government
is listening in on online conversations and exchanges but “have never
been able to prove it.” He added: “It’s been a worst-case-scenario
prediction that all turned out to be true, to a worrying extent.”

However, when people get in the Twitter mindshare and the Times and seem to have very influential and wealthy backers, it's important to take a reality check. Here's one:

Most of these services are still relatively small. For example,
Cryptocat, the encrypted-message service, typically sees peaks of around
20,000 simultaneous users. In recent months, that number has grown to
27,000. But it’s a far cry from the hundreds of thousands, or even
millions, that mainstream social networking tools and services can
claim.

You know, there may be 1.7 million phone jailbreakers, i.e. a rough estimate of the number of dangerous geeks there are out there LOL. But there are only 27,000 Crypto kids. Be grateful!

So, yeah, that. Most people do not feel a burning need to encrypt their email. It's a cumbersome process and in some places it will draw more attention to you for the mere fact that you're encrypting. And I suspect the lack of sign-ups for Cryptocat is because this is a niche enterprise. Most people are not radical revolutionaries trying to overthrow the state and requiring encryption services.

And in case you missed the point that people like Nadim are not just interested in encryption as some kind of public service, here he spells out his radical agenda:

Tools like Cryptocat, he said, are just the impetus for a larger
discussion. “It’s not an answer by itself,” he said. “It is a
combination of privacy and technology, democratic movement and political
discussion that it is not acceptable to use the Internet as a
surveillance medium.”

Well, except the Internet, like telephones and phones and mails and lots of stuff, *can* be used as a surveillance medium when the targets are legitimate law-enforcement targets. Revolutionaries who want to seize power never concede that. Well, some of them are among the criminals, the pirates, the drug dealers and so on.

My comment:

But wait. Nadim Kobeissi has not in fact proved that the government is
listening in on conversations of people that are not legitimate
law-enforcement and intelligence targets. That's just it. We have yet to
get a single bona fide solid case from Edward Snowden's hacks. Kaepora
here is merely affirming this as a belief, but he has not made the
findings to back it up. As much as the adversarial journalists and
their hacker friends have claimed there is a mass surveillance state,
they have only shown the hypothetical potentials of machines, not the
actualities of cases.

Skip down below the fold to the headline WHY NEWCO WILL FAIL if you don't want to read the back story here, but I think it's an interesting one.

VIRTUAL DARFUR

One day in about 2006 or so a Canadian radio journalist interested in "progressive" issues IM'd me and asked me to come to a dinner where there would be a number of interesting people who followed human rights and humanitarian affairs, and even the famous e-bay founder Pierre Omidyar. She said he would be in disguise with a different name.

After a delicious-looking dinner, which we didn't eat because we couldn't, but only interacted with animatedly, I flew around the field behind the open-air table and soon Pierre was shooting me with some kind of nerf gun that sent puff-balls or chickens or something into the air...

Yes, it was Second Life, not real, except, more than real in some ways. These were the people who formed the virtual Darfur in Second Life, an installation that was supposed to raise awareness about the suffering of the Darfurians in Sudan, as they were being massacred by the janjawid, the government-backed vigilantes on horsebak who hacked and killed people, destroyed villages and stole animals and sent people fleeing into the bush. The "before" and "after" satellite photos were devastating. (I should note that I worked on the issues in Sudan/Chad for several years in several groups at the UN so was indirectly related to this.)

Virtual Darfur and other projects like virtual Guantanamo was a subject of great hope by techno-utopians and great derision by techno-realists -- but of course, Rik was actually quite pragmatic about using the technology for education and actually had projects funded in Second Life for youth, and Ethan turned out to be really more of a utopianist, because he could never stand it that Second Life cost money and attracted mainly people who could afford it (he never got it about all the Brazilians and Poles and even Africans on free accounts who in fact showed up there) and believed that until tech could be made free for everyone by some magical power, no one should waste time on it when they could be saving humanity some Better way. Oh, you know, like blogging politically-correct stuff at Global Voices...

To be sure, I was the first to say there was a creepy aspect to the Darfur installation that was not intended -- Second Life is rich with creative possibilities and objects and props and textures, and you can build almost anything and evoke a real sense of place and mood, but somehow, the props that could evoke mass murder just weren't available. It was in little details, like the fact that the campfires used in the display had robust logs with cheerful crackling and shooting flame sounds and animations, and seemed to have been lifted out of your Girl Scout camp, not the desert. The tents and chairs and such also had that clean modern, feeling of an American national park outing, not the desperation of an African refugee camp. People who poured in to see the interactive diarama would tend to do things like take out their marshmallow sticks, provided by a particularly clever Microsoft island active at that time, and it would sort of spoil the somber mood.

Worse, griefers soon swooped down on it trying to wreck things and overload and crash the server so people couldn't visit it. Anything that had any serious purpose would be ripe for attack by 4chan and Anonymous in those days -- the idea that these thugs "evolved" into "hacktivists" who genuinely took up good causes is absurd, because in fact they were just the opposite and cynically remained so even as they engaged in reputational laundering. The griefing parties then triggered a vigilante group named the Green Lantern Corps to come guard the camp and then they endlessly sparred, detracting from the original subject matter.

Screenshot by rikomatic. I should note that the graphics of 2006 or 2007 are very primitive compared to much improved rendering today in 2013 in Second Life.

So...I happened to have met Pierre virtually in Second Life where he was an
early investor and had a secret avatar, and also chatted with him
frequently in the early days of Twitter on my avatar @Prokofy and my
real life account @catfitz.

A BETTER WORLD

Pierre's stake in Second Life wasn't about merely making money or encouraging innovative 3D technology, although that was part of it, but it was because he was imbued with the idea that the Internet and social media and content-rich virtual worlds could make a Better World. This Better-worldism is an intense variant of the California Ideology that leans more to the technocommunist and collectivist than the technolibertarian and individualistic. I always saw Pierre as something of a Robin Hood -- he took from the relatively affluent (by Third World standards) working and middle class people on e-bay trying to sell their used hair-drivers and old baseball cards, clipping a crumb from each transaction like that dad in Bonfire of the Vanities (as he explained to his son), and then taking those funds and plowing them into various non-profit causes to help conflict-ridden Africans or poverty-stricken Americans or promoting various "progressive" causes like gender awareness.

There was something that always bothered me about that grand wealth transfer because the people who were thus shaken down -- and the prices kept going up and up on e-bay to sell stuff and people like me got chased away -- didn't get to vote on the causes. Oh, businessmen are free to do what they want with their profits, of course, but the whole model -- shake down some people who have a little bit extra, give it to the nonprofit class to donate overseas to the poor or help themselves to become more powerful as a political/cultural force at home -- struck me as one that didn't have any recipe for how society could continue into the future.

In other words, there wasn't a path to create new business people and new wealth, there was only the redistribution of existing wealth in a politicized manner.

Oh, don't get me wrong. There were some great causes in the Omidyar grants, and in fact, I used to work for some of the organizations and indirectly, why, even my small salary was paid for by this process. But that's just it -- too many people in that non-profit class never question the model because they depend on it. They don't explain how capitalism -- which makes these things possible! -- could continue in their social-democracy model.

SOCIALISM IN ONE SIM: NEUALTENBERG

Pierre had a close associate named Haney Armstrong who worked at Linden Lab as a community manager -- his name was Haney Linden inworld, as all the Linden staff took the same last name, and their real first name or a pseudonymous first name.

Haney was very enthusiastic about the Better Worlding capacity of Second Life, and immediately created a contest among the early adapters -- whoever submitted a project to create some kind of online experimental community for a cause would get a free simulator or server on which they could build their utopian world.

The collection of open software freaks and Singularists and transhumanists as well as designers and curiosity-seekers and those interested in the mechanisms of civil society online (like me, who came along later) were not very willing to come up with ideas for this contest. Maybe because after they got the free sim, valued at $1000-2000 depending on its style and location in the simulated world, they would still have to pay a maintenance fee of $195 a month to keep it going.

So there was only one entrant and thus only one winner for Haney's contest -- a plan for a socialist world called Neualtenberg after the alpine-style sim it was on. Haney was delighted -- it couldn't have been more up his alley to have Europeans and Americans devoted to communal socialist experiments take up this sim.

Some day entire dissertations could be written about this virtual "socialism on one sim" and I myself could write at least a few book chapters, but suffice it to say, it ended in tears, with one of the main founders, Ulricha Zugzwang, flying through the world and deleting all the buildings she had constructed in a fit of pique over a squabble with others over some sectarian matter -- she was tried in absentia and banned permanently for "high treason and terrorism." Another spinoff of the sim devoted to more pure socialist ideals created a guild system where you had to know the people and be chosen to open up a shop or cart as a merchant in their village. At first your rent would be higher, but then if you proved yourself and sold more, then it might be lower... In other words, these sims ended the way socialism often ends in real life -- and then some.

In Second Life, you can see the Sea of Omidyar, named after Pierre, and sometimes I would row my boat around the sea, filing dispatches to the Alphaville Herald about men out booming the waters in search of Lost Lindens, staff that were fired for reasons that were never explained and who we said were thrown into the sea...

Pierre seemed to cash out somewhere after that seed round -- it's not a public company but its stock did trade brisquely for awhile in the secondary markets when it was really popular. I don't think he bothers with it any more, I'm not sure.

OMIDYAR NETWORK

Haney left, and swimming up from the Sea of Omidyar, emerged as the community manager at Omidyar Network, another venture that Pierre organized that I joined for a time on the edges -- it was awfully politically correct there and it was really hard to have a real conversation because there were just too many PC types there.

There were two other big problems with this network -- no, three:

1. People found it hard to criticize anything about Omidyar Network in form or substance because they were grantees -- they felt they had to play along quietly. This is always the problem of what we delicately referred to at the Soros Foundation as "the problem of a living donor". You're not getting a grant from an institution administered by officers, but you're getting it directly from the rich guy, and he (and his wife) who were also in it sort of throw a magnetic charge over the thing -- people are endlessly trying to get seen and suck up.

2. People who do good all day don't really feel like then coming to an online service and chatting about their do-gooding at night. That is, maybe some do, but there is a certain chore-like quality to it, and a surreal quality. I had only so much time in the day to work on, say, Belarus or Sudan issues, these were part-time jobs for me at the time. I'm the sort of person for whom human rights has been a vocation, not just a job, and I would often work on causes for free late into the night -- but then, it had to count. I couldn't justify as a freelancer coming and chatting for an hour and typing ideas for activism on top of that -- at least, in that sort of constrained atmosphere where there were moderators, with topics suggested by them, and that climate of people trying to impress.

Worst of all, they had a reputational rating system, where you could be rated for your comments -- and this added a gamification which also tended to detract rather than add. The few people who were either highly paid at no-show jobs or on fixed incomes had the time to endlessly type "lessons learned" and earn points from the mods, but the rest of us couldn't keep up.

3. For me personally, what was nasty about this particular earlier form of humanitarian Facebooking was that my personal data was not secure. It wasn't long before griefers in Second Life grabbed my real name, location, and address from this service, which was supposed to be membership-only but was open, and then pasted it all over various anonymous forums where people could then use it to harass me at home. I really hated this outing of my privacy, complained about the problem several times to Haney and others, but they just weren't willing to do anything about it. They were not willing to discipline and sanction the person who did this to me because I guess he was in their crowd. BTW, I think that's one of the same people who vandalize my Wikipedia to this day.

For these reasons (I imagine) or probably others that were more intricate involving factions or lack of cost effectiveness, this experiment was shut down. I think it's just too hard to get people to be in a virtual community online virtualizing their do-gooding -- it really doesn't result in a Better World. There wasn't any, as they say in this business of non-profiting, any "value-add."

But then, I never come at these projects as capable of changing human nature at all, as I'm not a transhumanist or Silicon Valley Better Worlder, like Pierre and the others. They should think more about governance and due process and human rights online and how to manage, not change, human nature.

BE CIVIL!

Oh, except that they did. Pierre is a smart and thoughtful guy. He next created a social media project for Hawaii, where he spends some of his time (I believe he's also in San Francisco and elsewhere), where he is from originally. This was supposed to be a civil place where there would be no griefing of the crude Second Life or Youtube kind, or even the more refinded mind-fuckery of the Well or even his Network. This would be subscribers only, with rules, and people would be rewarded for civility and everyone would live happily ever after.

Except, as I'm told by those who have been in it, and as some have commented privately here and there, it was boring, nobody went there, and there wasn't a market for it in Hawaii. I'm not sure why he didn't take it national or world-wide, but maybe he had this idea that unless people are hyper-local and tied to their real-life roots, online can't work. Otherwise, Ulricha Zugzwang comes swooping from the sky and blows up your simulated building...over whether you had 2/3 majority or absolute majority or a commission of scientists to run your planet...or Haney blocks you on the forum because you've been down-voted by the stay-at-home moms.

NEWCO OR NEUALTENBERG

So now Pierre Omidyar turns out to be the billionaire behind the story of a new new media site that will bring Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill and other neo-journo-activists on board for the new new....thing.

Once again, what I saw in Second Life and the next 2.0 generation on the Web in and around Second Life comes to real life, so to speak --- the West Coast invades the East Coast. And all the topics I've been following so avidly -- with such alarm -- come together once again.

09/13/2013

Tech in Silicon Valley is mainly about men. And if you want them to have the freedom to keep innovating great products, you have to let them decide their corporate speech code in the end. Photo by TechCrunch.

The tech world was in a lather about a sexist app that turned up at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco called TitStare (see below). No surprise there -- somebody should make an app called TitScare that tracked all the pearl-clutching that occurred after this incident.

Somehow, although I thought there was at least some kind of minimal vetting process, during the Hackathon portion of the show (not the main show with the start-ups), two Australian dudes got up with this offensive app that enabled men to take pictures of themselves staring at strangers' tits and share them. Ugh, how stupid.

There was another entry of a guy with some kind of phone-shaking act that required him to put on a fake jerking-off motion to illustrate the phone shaking feature. Sigh.

I don't recall tasteless things like this at the four TechCrunch Disrupt conferences I've been to in New York, although I didn't catch every Hackathon, which is more wild and runs all night with people drinking Red Bull and crashing on bean bag chairs as they code up a frenzy to win a large monetary prize for their idea.

In any event, Alexia Tsotsis, who seems to be the queen bee these days at TechCrunch, immediately apologized on Facebook and Twitter for this tasteless app the minute it got a dis on Twitter, then later the company, owned by AOL, had a more formal apology. Alexia wrote later about how there would be more efforts to vet the apps suggested to their program to see that they weren't hateful or sexist or made people "feel unsafe". Like the "Girlsnearme" app that did debut in the start-up section at TechCrunch some years ago, people are grossed out by apps that cross the privacy line into the creep zone.

I figured the matter was closed with TechCrunch's huge mea culpa over this, but no, the zealous punishers of the tech world were not done yet.

As befitting of a maven of "free expression" in the tech set who hates any criticism of her powerful tribe, Jillian York @jilliancyork has me blocked on Twitter, but I look her up occasionally or someone will write to me on email about how awful she is being -- it's funny how there are people who think this even around her crowd.

JILLIAN ENSURES LIFE-RUINING EFFECTS

It turns out that Jillian not only denounced TitStare, she demanded that Sam Biddle, the Valley Wag editor who is quite prepared to report gross stuff on Valley Wag just as Gawker is, should not only report the app and its condemnation, but out the name of the two Australian developers who created it. That's to make sure that they had those "life-ruining effects" that Anonymous so loves for others with demands of exposure and avoids itself with secrecy. While he had originally reported the story, he didn't mention their names; later, demonstratively at her request, he put them in.

That was creepy -- bad enough that this company has its product and its company name ruined forever over their classless act, the two devs also have to be tarred and feathered in the main gossip rags for the Valley due to their tastelessness. And we all know that if that app hasn't been put out of business, these articles are only making some people scurry to download it and gawk at tits.

BALANCE?

My first thought about this incident was that you simply cannot have innovation and creativity in inventing things if you suppress free speech, even speech you don't like, because it is hard to draw the line. The resulting rule book for taste now at Hackathon sounds so complicated that it is bound to kill off some creativity.

My second thought was that any private community of people can establish its standards of speech because freedom of association is not trumped by freedom of speech. TechCrunch gets to do this and that's fine. Hence the court decision about the Boy Scouts being entitled not to grant membership to gays -- one that the "progressive" tech set of course doesn't accept as a rights principle, and one that Michael Arrington in particular does not accept as a principle because he thinks gay rights should trump the rights to make membership rules for your private association -- and he blocked me on Facebook over my pointing out that this is a conflict of rights.

DOUBLE STANDARDS

And also I thought of course of the many times Jillian has exhibited double standards or triple standards even on these matters.

And the people that defend her are awful, and she never had anything to say about their nastiness to me. I've never seen people on the left in such denial about a clear-cut Islamist attack on a news caster that was an appalling abuse of women's rights and freedom of speech.

Now, to be sure, you can see from her timeline that she has some Anons now that definitely need some paper-training, making nasty comments about her menstrual period, or literalizing about her job title, when they are the bullies. But there doesn't seem to be more than 3-4 of those types of characters and she and her friends go into such hysterics you'd think they were treated like Kathy Sierra -- who got not one whit of sympathy from the EFF gang back in the day or thoughtful thumb-sucking pieces about inclusiveness of the sort Jillian turns out today.

And that's just the problem. It would be one thing to make a point that we need balance, or we need to ensure that free speech doesn't enable a few extremists to use hate and intimidation and ridicule to silence others from exercise of their free speech. Yes, I get all that.

DEFENDING SEX OFFENDERS, EFF IS NOT THE ARBITER OF TASTE OR SPEECH

But it's another to cede to *this* crowd in and around EFF the right to wield power on these decisions. In that sense, Sam Biddle rushing to out those two guys in a group hate exercise at the behest of Ms. Freedom of Expression definitely felt creepy -- especially because Sam Biddle isn't rushing to do other things like question the HUGELY creepy siding of EFF with child abusers.

Their notion of "a chilling affect" is arrant bullshit, of course, because the government is NOT saying no one can have nicks or that they have to register them. They're just saying that convicted sex offenders can't! Hello! With good reason! And they're not saying even sex offenders can't have protected communications on health or political forums, i.e. legitimate activity not indulging in their sex crimes again, nor are they saying they have to be "outed" to the public at large. It's saying *law enforcement* must have this information to be able to monitor them if the use aliases. After all, they can't be trusted and are among the most conniving criminals on earth.

But so zealous is the insane tenacity with which EFF clings to that Autonomous Realm on the Internet which they want to extend and rule only themselves, that they can't concede this normal law-enforcement requirement. Very creepy. The same people who want to have their "freedom of expression" director run a posse against those Australians and string them up to be harangued by public opinion over tit pics are happy to have child predators hide behind their anonymity, so, um, we all can have that right...supposedly. Until Jillian or Anonymous decide to take it away for any reason or no reason. Freedom of expression, availability of privacy for me, not for thee. EFF is awful, and Jillian is among the worst features of it.

TITSTARE IS WORSE THAN TAHIR

Jillian couldn't see her way clear to condemning the horrid sexual attacks of Egyptian demonstrators against the CBS anchorwoman because it didn't fit within her narrative of celebrating the Arab Spring and the Muslim Brotherhood. She was silent about the MB's abuses of women and their drive to remove women's rights. She is no feminist and no women's rights activist.

ONLY when she saw a way to exploit this issue to gain power for her tribe at a moment when the zeitgeist was loathing the brogrammer culture did she strike. NOW she pontificates about the need for safe environments. But she rejects the questions that some people have had about EFF's selective concern about free speech -- EFF is really, in its culture, like the ACLU in the past stumping for the Ku Klux Klan not to be banned from demonstrating in Skokie in a community of Jewish people, and not like the ACLU of today which finds some way of denouncing Internet bullying by affirming gay rights (and I'm not at all sure they've found the right line for First Amendment application there, anymore than those yelping about TitStare have).

TitStare is protected First-Amendment speech. So is the nasty stuff turned in by Pax Dickinson, formerly at Business Insider. So are nasty comments made about Jews and gays like this guy Spruce Cycle who says in a general sort of way on Twitter that they should be killed -- as I should be for my blog. That's also protected speech. Ugly, horrible, but legal.Except, exercising my own free speech and association rights, I get to block it from my blog; Twitter might decide to block it under their vague speech code, but it's not likely they will.

If that's a good thing, because if the hugely sectarian and tendentious tech community which controls social media platforms decides where the First Amendment is to be applied, where will it actually live and have its being? Because it has a right to.

TITS BAD, DICKS NOT

There's also the obvious double standard of Jillian having nothing at all to say about Rebecca McKinnon opening her speech at the OSCE meeting on Internet Freedom in Dublin last year with a denunciation of Apple for "censorship" because they wouldn't publish an app in the app store involving a cartoon of the Ulysses story of James Joyce showing nude males. See, in the world of geek morality, which Rebecca and Jillian defended, it wasn't okay to block nude males -- or block the hateful Palestinin intifada app -- but TitStare has to go -- and AOL saying we're sorry and it won't happen again isn't enough, the mob has to go for the jugular.

And that's when you realize how this works -- not even under a notion of political correctness but merely one of "Whatever we say goes." It's about power, not speech, not about intimidation or inclusiveness but enabling a group of "thought leaders"to decide what stays or goes or who will be pilloried. And I'm sorry, that has to go, and has to be fought. It might be that some, like Aryeh Neier on the Nation editorial board and once leader of the ACLU (during Skokie) and Human Rights Watch, will take the position, as he did back in the 1980s, against opposing the censorship of Linda Lovelace's Deep Throat despite feminist objections. Others will demand perfect PC pitch on everything from minorities to gays to women -- and things we can't know about yet because they are still deciding. Like whether we can criticize geeks as a class as having too much power...

The place for arbitration should be not one group in society deciding for us all, like EFF which isn't defending speech but prescribing it, but the courts, and each group (like TechCrunch) deciding their own levels without fear or favour.

My point about that has been for 10 years that this is a problem for all of us, not just a PC feminist problem -- they represent hateful authoritarian culture that damages freedom for us all. But neither Jillian and Sam have ever, ever been around to denounce Anonymous' grotesque misogyny or persecution of those who criticize them.

Jillian only turns to denounce those Anons in her feed whining about her net-nannying now -- she was completely absent during Steubenville when people like that were harassing me and other bloggers because we exposed their vigilantism.

No, back then, "the community" needed Anon on that day to slam the "norms" of" meat-world" who were antithetical to geekdom -- the football team -- and they seized upon women's rights suddenly although for ages, the very same people had harassed young women on Youtube or passed around gross misogynist pictures on 4chan. That's what's so hypocritical about all this. The issue of "safe spaces for women" is merely a totem in a power struggle and not really a civil rights struggle against the lawlessness of the hacker movement which would have wider implications for democracy and rights for all of us.

What's especially awful about York's posturing on this is that she purports to be opposed in principle to censorship in theory, and purports to see no red line to be drawn:

You see, I don’t see censorship as a solution to
anything. I see it as a band-aid slapped carelessly over a gaping,
septic wound. That is not to deny the effects of harassment, or even “hate speech”
(click the link to understand why I use quotes around that term), but
to say that the problem is institutional, systemic, and in need of a
better solution. It makes me very frustrated when arguments are made to
ban a certain type of speech, but seem to go no further, as if ridding
our spaces of that speech is the be-all end-all to solving the problem.
Hint: it’s not.

Most of all, I don’t believe
that censorship offers lasting benefits. If this were a perfect world,
in which we could draw a very solid red line between speech that should
be banned and speech that should not, and we were all able to have a
voice in making those determinations, and that blocking was done with
the utmost oversight, transparency, and accountability, you might be
able to convince me.

But despite these proclamations, Jillian York was for "our crowd" -- her tribe of geeks at EFF -- letting her have the authority to get Sam Biddle to run and out those Australians. And her organization defends the right of sex offenders to hide their online identities -- and thus go back to doing what they did to get arrested. She's for denuncing dweebs in her timeline and inciting hysteria about comments on the Internet as if she is the Joan of Arc of Internet liberation who is terribly persecuted and harassed and therefore authorized to draw lines. It's really creepy, and neither she nor EFF can be the ones who decide. They are not honest brokers.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH, FREEDOM OF ASSOCIATION, THEY GO TOGETHER!

Meanwhile, we have to be for the First Amendment to prevail for the sake of a free society and free thought and inventiveness of the sort TechCrunch celebrates, and we also have to be for freedom of association to enable groups and corporations to decide what their own speech code is and enforce it as they see fit in conferences, advertising, contests, whatever. We do have rights here that engender principles and we can affirm them and they don't contradict.

We don't have to say that it's too hard, and that only EFF can decide for us -- or whatever gaggle of geeks Sam Biddle pulls together on Valley Wag.

08/12/2013

Samantha Power in 2008 at Stacy's book store in San Francisco reading her book. Photo by Steve Rhodes.

Amb. Samantha Power, the new US ambassador to the UN, isn't the first ambassador of the Wired State -- Amb. Susan Rice was very active and substantive on Twitter, and of course there are many other talkative envoys on Twitter, including our own (in the Russian field) @mcfaul out of Moscow.

Apparently Amb. Power is new to the whole Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/hashtag thing. So advice from someone who was an early adapter since 2007: if you are in public office, don't tweet more than one or two really pithy highly retweetable *substantive* thoughts of your own a day, and let an intern spend the rest of the day, once or twice an hour tweeting links to speeches, resolutions, or interesting news articles. Know your own value and the dignity of office. Be mindful of the fact that the main intellectual life of America's intelligentsia, such as it is, is taking place now on Twitter on a few thousand accounts, mainly of old media news editors and journalists, and don't let them bully you, get to you, trap you, or literalize you to death. Just keep moving and live to tweet another day. Don't do hashtags yourself like #WhatMatters like some lame and desperate beverage company because you won't get the traction or the volume or the trending topic when you do that. You also run the risk on the free-for-all that is Twitter that "the masses" (which usually consists of pretty skilled cadres, some from malevolent governments) will tell you to do things that you can't or shouldn't do, like withdraw aid from Israel or invade Syria.

Make your own substantive and pithy tweet be the thing that brings you the eyeballs and let the retweeting be organic rather than trying to force a dumb hashtag.

Do not hire Twitter or social media gurus -- they are a waste of time and money and also just various political groupings jockeying for power under the guise of consulting.

Twitter is best when it is about thought-casting, not broad-casting or life-casting. It's not a radio show because anyone can talk back without being selected for the phone-in show. It's not interesting if you tell us who you had lunch with and don't tell us what you talked about. So draw yourself up to your full height and try to say something for the historical annals that is meaningful as best you can.

I'm a big believer in making these government Twitter accounts really service-oriented public property and not putting personal names on them -- when @alecjross left the State Department, he took some 300,000 followers with him, many of whom he could DM because he followed them back, which mean the State Department essentially no longer had a mailing list. That's wrong. (It's like Obama For American converting to Organizing for Action and taking all the campaign lists away from the Democratic Party). By contrast, Susan Rice had a generic ambassador account.

But @ambassadorpower has decided to make what is unquestionably the coolest Twitter handle this year, and it should win prizes for its hipster double entendre -- but you don't win prizes if you have 50,000 followers instead of 20,000 if most of them are SEO gurus, bots, and porn stars. Follow more people back -- a ratio of a tiny number of followees to followers lets us know you are broadcasting, not thoughtcasting.

Basically, you have to go into the whole social media with a really robust sense that everything that Alec Ross and Jared Cohen tried to convince everybody about at the State Department when they horsed them into Twitter was all wrong. Both of them are no longer there for good reason. Ross, Cohen and his co-author Eric Schmidt of Google all have a radical ideology of connectivity as magnificent "better world" instrument. It's essentially preposterous and just about every thing that Ross ever talked about as "empowered" or "bettered" by social media flopped, particularly in the Arab World. Basically, Twitter is merely a (limited) communications tool, and if it is a tool for *service* in public office, it should be about *service* and not building up followers for the next gig.

FIRST SPEECH AT THE FOURTH ESTATE

@ambassadorpower has already given her first speech -- outside the UN, at the Fourth Estate Leadership Summit, which you can read here.

And that rings even more true today. Today ordinary citizens don’t
just advocate for change and action, they force change and they take
action themselves. Invisible Children doesn’t just lobby policymakers to
go after the LRA—they do that and they do it well—but they also design
fliers that tell LRA fighters how they might defect, and they
distributes them—more than 400,000 fliers so far—into LRA-affected areas
in DRC and the Central African Republic. Invisible Children has also
built six locally-run FM radio stations in areas of high LRA activity.
These stations now reach an audience covering more than 29,000 square
miles.

And if you’ve ever doubted your activism matters, just think that the
Kony video you made go viral, was sent by high school kids in
Massachusetts to their Senator who joined with his colleagues to write a
law that President Obama signed to create a rewards program to
apprehend Kony and his thugs. And a few months ago that Senator from
Massachusetts, now Secretary of State John Kerry, announced that thanks
to that law—thanks to you—the State Department was offering the first
cash rewards to bring the LRA killers to justice. That’s you. You.

I don't know if Amb. Power knows that the creator of the Kony video went crazy -- he was found raving and stark-naked after pounding car hoods on the street -- and had to be put in a mental hospital for some time.

Except...those advisers didn't accomplish anything yet and Kony is still on the run, I believe mainly in the Central African Republic -- that hell-mouth of Africa which is so poor that apparently it has had to sell ambassadorships to fugitive Kazakh government officials so they could try to claim immunity from prosecution.

But no matter -- I don't think ultimately the Kony video -- despite all the sneering of the Twitterati about it -- was the worst thing and it helped "raise awareness".

More troubling in this speech is this kind of feel-good paragraph that is meant to inspire, but misleads:

This new kind of activism is visible so many places, on so many of
today’s most critical issues. An army of citizen activists police the
conduct of the recent Kenyan elections, using the tools of the web to
monitor hate speech and document fraud in an effort to prevent a repeat
of significant violence. In a region—the Arab world—that barely knew
democracy as recently as three years ago, we see tens of millions of
people moving governments, and, at times, removing them, driven by that
universal desire to have their voices heard. At a time of economic
uncertainty, we see tens of thousands taking to the streets in Russia
and beyond, because they are no longer willing to turn a blind eye to
corruption or to accept the growing inequalities in their own societies.

Shouldn't these kids get a more realistic picture of the real challenges on the day after the activism? Facing the backlash from authoritarian governments, for instance.

Russians aren't taking to the streets in such large numbers because some key leaders have been arrested and falsely charged. There've been a number of show trials, such as that of Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption campaigner sentenced to five years of prison, but let out while he appeals in order to run in a very stage-managed Moscow mayor election. Lesser known people continue to be beaten and jailed and of course there's the Snowden defection -- which is why Obama cancelled the summit, even as regretably, he's going to legitimize Putin by attending the G20 in St. Petersburg.

Unfortunately, Russia's domestic behaviour is off-limits at the UN Security Council -- which nowadays includes rounding up and beating migrants and deporting refugees and beating and persecuting gays and minorities along with corruption at the Sochi Olymipcs and long-term cases like Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Pussy riot.

But there's Syria -- a mass crime against humanity in which 100,000 have been massacred and tens of thousands have fled to neighbouring countries. Russia must be made to take exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, fully paid-up, worldwide ownership for backing and arming the Assad regime. This is the main account over which Ambassador Power has to use her ambassador power to affect in the next few years before she leaves to write her next book. And it will be nearly impossible not only because of the veto, but because of the rampant anti-Americanism at the UN.

Amb. Power should try to deal with this -- Amb. Rice was very successful in disregarding the antagonistic anti-American atmospherics and repeatedly calling out Russian perfidy again and again. But it really is important to try to win over India, Pakistan, Rwanda and the other elected 10 on the SC because they are all disgruntled about Libya, completely turned off to humanitarian intervention, completely sour on the US over the NSA spy stuff -- and just needed to whip up domestic sentiment to distract from their own crimes by endlessly inciting hatred of America.

08/01/2013

Tom Watson is a social entrepreneur who used to work as a reporter who today, like a lot of the "progressive" consultants and "thought influencers" and "change leaders" you see on Twitter have figured out how to make the dying field of journalism and NGO activism pay on social media by tying it to a consulting business for cause non-profits and betterworlding blogging. Good for him! Better to be paid by the diminishing nonprofit world and blogging and tweeting than not be paid except for Google ad pennies, right? Let me sum up one of the positive things about Tom -- as far as I know, he's never done a TED talk.

The problem is that the line between journalism and business in the center or right which "progressives" are always claiming to quickly ascertain as blurred in mainstream media, in favour of The Man, the Establishment , the Prison Military Complex, and Wall Street, in fact is just as blurred here on the left where the upbeat messages of the efficacy of social media to "change the world" are in direct proportion to the need to get consulting contracts. That is, you can't report critically on a space where you also hope to make money selling that space as effective -- this is what I explain to Alex Howard, who keeps angrily insisting he's a journalist although he's the PR guy/lobbyist for O'Reilly in Washginton. These jobs are public relations or marketing jobs and there is nothing wrong with marketing! But let's not mistake them for ethics-grounded journalism.

The thing is, Tom Watson is better than most of these social media gurus because he's actually willing to be a tad critical of not only the artifacts of Silicon Valley but the anarcho-communist hacker movements that have thrived on Big IT's products. For example, I remember him willing to frown at least a little bit at the tactic of DDoSing other people's servers you don't like if you want to force your own ideas on people.

Tom Watson has published a piece in Forbes -- which I have to wonder can be properly called "the capitalist tool" anymore, what with Andy Greenberg writing with barely-concealed envy of hacker-heroes and Mark Adomanis shilling for the Kremlin. But capitalism, like socialism, has to make a living online nowadays like all of us and isn't what it once was...

And that's just it -- Watson explains to us less perceptive folk that we're all wrong if we think Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden are "traitors" -- and he even hints that the old concept of "whistleblower" isn't quite right. Oh, these old ethical categories must fall away, you know, like these silly distinctions between "marketing" and "journalism" of the new order.

Well, in part, that's progress, because neither of these two malevolent hacksters are "whistleblowers" because neither of them has focused on a single real case that they really cared about and really worked on it -- which is frankly not only my test for sincere human rights and social activism, but the public's, when they look past the rhetoric.

But Watson wants to abandon the old ethical categories and terms for people who disown their own countries and reserve for them now a special new category -- pioneers:

I was thinking about those days in the context of the often
cartoonish coverage of mega-leakers Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden.
So much of the question about them boils down to a lame cultural A/B
test. Each man is either a hero or a traitor. There’s no in between –
which runs counter to every experience I ever had as a reporter with a
source who handed me documents that I wasn’t supposed to have. Bradley Manning: Traitor or Hero,
asks the Daily Beast. And the usually canny pollsters at Quinnipiac
actually commissioned a poll that demanded a choice on Snowden – whistle-blower or traitor
– because, well, that’s the attention span and depth most people give
the story. Whistle-blower, hero, traitor – all loaded words.

So let’s try on another: how about “pioneers?”

Well, let's not and say we did. Watson right before that lets us know that when he was on the cub reporter's beat in the Bronx, he would meet with all kinds of whistleblowers, and yet he knew enough to probe deeper and find their motive, their axe to grind.

In working on the stories those sources generated, it was always vital
to include the leaker’s motivation in the formula for how to handle
follow-up reporting and writing. The politics almost always mattered; we
didn’t go the good guy-bad guy route. They were all shades of gray and
the allegiance of the reporters and editors I worked with was to the
impact and accuracy of the story. If we chose sides it was manifest in what we decided to report on – which stories we deemed important and spent out time on – and not in how we wrote them.

But sadly Watson now throws overboard his very important real-life training in journalism and experience in dealing with sources -- that frankly most bloggers and tweeters just don't have -- and decides that he doesn't need to ask the kind of hard questions about the motives of these WikiLeaks anarchists that I do. Instead, he can embrace them as heros in the new matrix of social media, cyberspace and governance -- that Special Unicorm Realm where Tom now makes his living as, well, a propagandist for forcing social change through the coded artifact of social media using NGOs still able to live off the remnants of wealth generated by 19th and 20th century business tycoons.

Why is Watson willing to bless Manning and Snowden as "pioneers" in a Brave New World? Well, because as computer programmers, they hold the keys to his special realm of cyberspace and are ushering us into the future:

What matters is that digital security in our still young,
newly-networked age is losing almost as quickly as privacy – and privacy
has lost, almost completely.

So...it doesn't matter that these two disabled a liberal democratic state under the rule of law with separation of powers and checks and balances that legitimately classified files on diplomacy or war or counterterrorism -- what matters is that all these old structures be swept away and we let infantiles who didn't graduate from high school and were raised on the Internet without fathers (unless you count Richard Stallman and John Perry Barlow) decide our world and form of governance for us.

What matters is our "newly networked age" -- whatever that is (I'm always questing to find out what it is these champions of the Wired State are ushering so quickly into being, and I wonder if they know themselves.)

And here Watson gets especially enthusiastic -- because it means consulting work to explain to non-profits how they can best take advantage of all this:

...there’s a trend on the social commons that has relevance not just
for government, but for every organized activity and entity collecting
and using digital data.

You know, marketers. Educators and thought leaders!

And that trend relates to the ease with which vast quantities of data
can be transferred – the very aspect of technology that makes our
digital lives possible. There is, quite frankly, no way to reconcile
hundreds of thousands of security clearances for government workers and
contractors – given access to data in the name of public safety and
national defense – with the ability of any of those individuals (with a
political axe to grind or not) from making the information public.

So, let's not try, right?! Watson makes no secret of the fact that he finds this all exciting and heady:

Gathering information is easy, and getting easier – as millions of
consumers voluntarily put their personal data on public or corporate
networks. Keeping that information secret is clearly much more
difficult, and may be getting harder. That’s why Snowden and Manning –
whether traitors or heroes or neither – should be rightly be regarded as
the first arrivals of the wave still to come.

Why exciting? Well, you don't call people "pioneers" and speak of a thrilling "wave to come" if you think there might be something disturbing and wrong about what these radicals are doing in other people's names.

And that's why I put this reply to Tom:

Tom, I don’t know why it’s so hard for you “progressives” to
understand that when the road leads to Moscow — as it surely did for
Snowden and always has for Assange and WikiLeaks — Manning’s chosen
anarchist organizations — then you don’t keep nattering on about whether
they are whistleblowers but you call it — they are indeed traitors. Russia
is objectively speaking our enemy precisely because the Kremlin wages
war on America and the West itself, and we are forced to address this
security challenge. The overwhelming majority of cyber attacks in Europe
emanate from Russia. If I have to explain how WikiLeaks and Russia hook
up, you haven’t been paying attention.

What you fail to grasp is that the way in which you run movements
really matters. If you run them like Bolsheviks, you get Bolshevik
results. We do not require having national conversations by force and
fiat, coerced by fait accomplis organized by these infantile nerds who
think they are still blowing things up at their Play Stations. None of the
things they claim they are about are true, which is easy to see in
Manning’s case because the story that supposedly caused his “epiphany” —
the Iraq printing press operators — was one that neither he — with his
fit of conscience — nor Assange — who found it just not interesting and
sensational enough — ever saw fit to publish. Maybe they feared if they
did, we’d all discover there was in fact good reason to arrest people
who weren’t only about a printing press? See, this is why they can’t be
trusted. As for Snowden, when he’s ready to tell us who that “suspected
hacker’s girlfriend is” with the bugged phone, and we can all check the
story, maybe he’ll have more credibility. Right now he has zero on a
hundred fronts.

It’s almost as if you can’t conceive of an agenda for reform for your
“progressivism” that might involve more transparency or less secrecy
without first deifying these creeps who achieved this *by force*. Trust
me, you do not want to live in a terror-state created by anarchists.
That’s what Russia is. That’s why we’re all here having this
conversation.